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Everything posted by nickrey
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This is one modern food process that is highly unlikely to appear in Modernist Cuisine, thankfully. In Australia, we've always called sausages "mystery bags." Seems the secret is out. I always wondered where the pink colour came from in frankfurters.
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Good Lord, "Bastard eggs?" Don't you love spelling checkers that "correct" your typing as you go along.
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Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there's no chemical basis behind winetasting and that experts cannot be correct about it. That's a heresy that you see trotted out all the time, but that I said above I think is BS. What I was inarticulately saying was that I don't think varietals, in general, are a good way to think about wine. If you take malbecs grown in Argentina and Cahors, they're not going to come off the same at all on the palate. The fact that they are the same varietal is not that meaningful. Guessing the varietal, when given the same grapes from all over the world, is going to be more a guessing game than a demonstration of skill. The wines will be different in concentration, texture, alcohol level, tannins, acidity, flavor, aroma, etc., even though they're from the same grape. Talking about varietals when talking about wine tasting is scientifically not very meaningful if you want to set up a controlled experiment to determine taste. So when Shalmanese says "3 reasonably well educated wine drinkers couldn't correctly tell 3 red wines of different varietals apart," that's scientifically meaningless. Maybe they couldn't tell the varietals apart (though maybe they could), but I'd bet they could talk about what the wines are doing and distinguish quality among them. If they couldn't, they're not reasonably well educated about wine. I wasn't referring to your comments with that reply but rather to those of some others earlier in the thread who were quoting "science" without actually quoting it. I agree with your points.
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Unfortunately the subject of wine tasting does not seem to be a burning issue for perceptual psychologists but let's put some published science on the table. One published paper found using triangle testing that experts can more successfully choose the odd sample among three wines than novices [solomon, G. (1990). Psychology of novice and expert wine talk. American Journal of Psychology, 105, 495–517.] Experts and novices could similarly detect whether two wines were the same or different by smell alone [Valentin, D., Pichen, M., de Boisherbert, V., Abdi, H. (2000). What's in a wine name: When and why do wine experts perform better than novices. Poster presented at the 41st Psychonomic Meeting, New Orleans (USA).] Other studies have found that experts seem to develop a conceptual map of characteristics of different varietals that they can use to distinguish these wines [eg. Hughson, A. & Boakes, R. (2001)Perceptual and Cognitive Aspects of Wine Expertise, Australian Journal of Psychology, 53, 103-108.] In other words, published and peer reviewed studies show that you can develop a sensory schema of the characteristics of varietals and successfully perceive them.
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Interesting. Part of your argument here seems to equate with Nathan Mhyrvold's assertion in Modernist Cuisine that it is impossible for anyone to tell where a wine comes from by taste alone (I'm paraphrasing but this was the thrust of his assertions). There are several hundred people in the world who have done the Master's of Wine qualification who have performed this task successfully in a standardised fashion in blind tastings. One would think that many more who have not chosen this path would be able to do so. The difference is skill development and expertise. Maybe it's me but I shudder every time I see the phrase "reasonably well educated" before someone saying that this is proof that something doesn't work. Even more so when I see someone say that they need to see results first hand before they will believe them. Just because you or your friends cannot perceive differences doesn't mean that others can't. In another thread, I had someone swearing on their expertise and faith that jaccarding a piece of steak makes no difference to liquid retention. I experimented and showed it did, to a marked extent. You can probably deduce from this that I agree on testing things. However, I would suggest further that subjects are carefully chosen before making sweeping assertions one way or the other.
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The borscht would be nice in cups as an appetiser. Rather than smoked salmon on black bread, how about smoked salmon and creme fraiche on blini? Or blini with creme fraiche, halved hard-boiled quail egg topped with salmon caviar. Or devilled eggs topped with salmon caviar?
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How about a Beet Gazpacho, made with beets and strawberries instead of tomatoes? It would be a variant of Borscht but a bit lighter and cleaner.
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If you're talking about nathanm, the sous vide thread was only a part of his cooking journey that started when he was very young. He came early into the sous vide thread to seek information on this cooking process. When he realised that there was very little information out there for the home cook, he started experimenting. One thing led to another and his cooking tables morphed in the plan of doing a book on sous vide cooking, which we all looked forward to eagerly. The project scope expanded, somewhat dramatically, and Modernist Cuisine was the result.
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I'm all for accuracy as well but let's face it, we are talking cooking not rocket science. Let's even talk about the dirty little secret that even with pastry you measure according to the recipe, then you adjust to give the correct feel. Humidity in the air, different gluten contents, etc. will all mitigate against creating a standard product by measurement alone. If this were not the case, we wouldn't have expert pastry chefs. If the original recipe is not accurate, which as I said earlier is likely, no amount of error caused by liquid sticking inside vessels or the like is going to make one iota of difference. If you feel happier getting a more accurate instrument, that's great. If you use an approximate that's also great, particularly as recipes tend to be approximations anyway. The benefit of using weight comes from differences such as the fineness of grind (eg. using fine salt versus coarse salt when a teaspoon is specified can give a huge variation in seasoning unrelated to the accuracy of the measuring instrument). My recommendation is to follow the rest of the world and use the metric system of weights. As someone said above, one liter of water equals one kilo. Easy to remember, easy to use. If tablespoons, teaspoons, etc are used, make sure you have the appropriate ones for the recipe you use: they differ around the world so you not only have an inaccurate measure, it can be more inaccurate if you don't know the volumes involved. Most of all relax: measure to some accuracy, then taste, then adjust. Balance is all important and this is an art rather than a science.
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Most (non-pastry) professional chefs that I know tend to measure by eye and adjust for taste afterwards. If a cookbook written by a chef has measures, it's likely to be an estimate of what they do by intuition anyway.
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eG Foodblog: Hassouni (2012) - Beirut and beyond
nickrey replied to a topic in Food Traditions & Culture
Thanks for this most interesting week of food and travel.. and more food. -
Looking forward to seeing how it turns out.
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And very evenly rolled I note.
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Or alternatively, you could do what I did and go to a specialist storage shop and pick up a suitable container. Look for one that has a number 5 in the recycle symbol, which means it is polypropylene. This is a folder storage box from which I cut out a piece of the lid so the circulator could go inside. It was $14. It is also the ideal size for the unit to be stored inside using the original delivery packaging. PedroG uses ping pong balls as an insulator. I'm going to get myself a piece of styrofoam, cut it to size, and glue it inside the lid.
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eG Foodblog: Hassouni (2012) - Beirut and beyond
nickrey replied to a topic in Food Traditions & Culture
Great blog, very interesting and makes me want to make the pilgrimage to Auburn in Sydney which is one of our Middle East enclaves. Thanks to wikipedia, I've found out that foul is fava or broad beans, can you let us know how they are prepared? -
Check out this page. It is amongst the options. It does not appear separately in other places on their site. I'm sure if you wrote to them they'd give you a quote.
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Apparently he did a stint at Petersham a while ago, may have been a continuation of that.
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No, it is a closed and very simple unit. On the other hand, there may be a combination of keys that would make it possible.
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Next instalment. This time, I cooked a pork fillet. Set the machine for 60C. Tested with Greisinger reference thermometer. Once again, the LCD readings oscillated, but not so the reference thermometer, which was rock steady on 60.2C. I then adjusted target temperature to 59.8C and it sat consistently on 60C. The controller kicks in about with the same regularity as the PID controller on my espresso machine. I'm very happy with the unit, particularly as I found a polycarbonate container that holds 20 liters of water and also fits the unit with the VacStar styrofoam packing in place.
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Ah, no. These are pulse width (PWM) or pulse frequency (PFM) modulated. The control loop controls the percent of time the heater is on. This allows a cheap relay or SCR to switch the element. They all work this way including my old analog PolyScience unit. That explains the clicking noise when the relay switches.
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Ok, first report. Got myself a 20l polycarbonate tub today and ran the SousVideChef. Started with water around five degrees below target (which was 59.5C). Time to heat up 20l of water up 5C was less than 10 minutes. I was a bit concerned as my Greisinger reference thermometer appeared to be reading .5C less than the unit. As the unit approached the target temperature, this levelled out. When it reached the set temp (59.5C), the reference thermometer read 59.4C, and once every 45 seconds or so clicked over to 59.5C. This pattern of temperature readings on the Greisinger was steady over a 45 minute period. In my opinion, it was rock solid, possibly .1 lower than set temperature, but nothing of note. What happened on the LCD thermometer on the unit, however, was different. On that the unit seemed to oscillate between 59.4C and 55.7C, which seems to be exactly the behaviour that your friend reported Pep. Please note, however, that the reference thermometer was much more consistent, and that included measurements taken anywhere in the 20l container. So we have a stable temperature according to the reference thermometer but an oscillating temperature according to the unit. I think this is the way that I prefer it to be. Moreover, this level of stability cannot be achieved by a simple on/off controller so it must be a PID as advertised. One last comment is that the switch for turning the heating unit on and off has quite a loud click, which could be distracting especially given the level of thermal loss from the uncovered polycarbonate container. If this performance level is consistent, I'm a very happy purchaser.
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Just in case you haven't caught up with the news, Skye Gyngell has left Petersham nurseries and is to be replaced by another Aussie, Greg Malouf. Article here. Edited to add, always read the story before posting [doh].
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I've received mine. Shopping for a suitable cooking container on the weekend. Will post pictures and measurements once I get to using it. I know from the sous vide magic that the PID settings vary depending on what you are driving. Obviously the PID settings for this machine will vary according to the type of container used (insulated or not, conductive of heat or less so, thermal covering on top of water, etc). If they have fixed settings, it has to be for a choice of one type of container. Vac-Star sell a polycarbonate container as well as thermal balls to sit on top of the water so my bet is that they have optimised tuning for that. If you use anything other than this, I'd say you have to live with some variance. However, as I said above, 0.2C variance has no impact on cooking. If you want less variance, it's easy: spend more money and get a unit that costs many times as much.